New Jersey is home to more than 9,071 farms covering 715,057 acres of farmland. It ranks 5th in blueberry production, 3rd in cranberry production, 3rd in spinach, 3rd in bell peppers, 4th in peach production. (Source: http://www.state.nj.us/nj/about/garden/)
Set aside time for the cranberry talk at the Princeton Ag Group lunchtime gathering, 11 a.m. on Friday, March 20, at Equad E-322. Lyndon Estes, associate research scholar of WWS-STEP, writes: Peter Oudemans from the plant biology and pathology at Rutgers and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station works closely with cranberry and blueberry industries, mostly in the Pine Barrens. This is a good chance to learn more about Garden State agriculture, as well as Peter’s innovative work (with remote sensing and other technologies) to help growers manage pathogens and improve yields.
Vast inefficiencies throughout the global food supply chain result in immense amounts of food loss and waste, with associated losses to our finite natural resources and harm to the environment and the climate.
A workshop, Engineering Strategies for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain on Monday, March 16 and Tuesday, March 17 at the Friend Center will unite experts from several engineering disciplines with experts in psychology, sociology, public policy, and economics to explore the technological approaches to improvements.
Five multi-disciplinary technology areas will be addressed: food preservation, food spoilage and contamination, food waste management such as waste-to-energy biofuels, low-tech food storage for the developing world and systems-level analysis.
The workshop also will:
Identify technical challenges, gaps and barriers;
Examine case studies of cost-effective and efficient technologies related to the food-energy-water nexus and their impacts on the environment;
Determine technical requirements that enable tailored engineering solutions (e.g., novel sensor, packaging, and temperature and humidity control) through multi-disciplinary collaborative research efforts; and
Propose custom technical solutions for different steps in the supply chain and for different parts of the world at various stages of development.
The workshop is funded by the United Engineering Foundation and co-organized by Catherine A. Peters, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Uta Krogmann, associate professor and associate extension specialist in solid waste management at the Department of Environmental Sciences of Rutgers University; and others, as well as the AIChE, IEEE-USA and ASCE.
The workshop is from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday and from 8:30 a.m. to 12:15 on Tuesday. To register or for more information, click here.
An agricultural/environmental sensing monitor designed by Kelly Caylor and his team took third prize in the Keller Center’s 10th Annual Innovation Forum last week at Princeton University. PulsePod, a combination of hardware and software, provides in-field monitoring of crop health, microclimate, water and nutrients — information that is currently not easily available to farmers. The device communicates securely with Internet-based computers that store data and perform analysis that helps farmers to optimize their resources, said Caylor, associate professor in civil and environmental engineering and director of the ENV program. His team includes Adam Wolf, an associate research scholar in ecology and environmental biology, and Ben Siegfried, a Princeton alumnus and technical assistant in civil and environmental engineering. First and second prizes in the competition, which is for University researchers to present potentially marketable discoveries, went to Mark Esposito, for an enzyme-blocking method to stop the spread of cancer and to Blake Johnson for his 3-D printed personalized nerve regeneration technology.
“When I see this crowd – and the diversity of the crowd – it’s obvious that food and agriculture are maybe the most compelling example of an academic or intellectual discipline that has a role to play in every department and every division on campus.”
– Kelly Caylor, Professor, CEE; Director, ENV Program
Several faculty at Princeton University teach classes related to food and its supporting complex systems. Note that this assembly is ongoing. Please click through to Connected Courses and write with additions.
Sustainability at Princeton, under the direction of Shana Weber, an ecologist, provides a collection of opportunities for Campus as Lab. Here’s the department’s website. Here’s the Campus as Lab site.
Dinner at Eno Terra, after the first Princeton Studies Food conference. A sponsor, Gordon Douglas ’55 MD, at right in photo, along with his wife, Sheila Mahoney, talked with (from left) Lyndon Estes, WWS-STEP associate research scholar; Kristi Wiedemann of Sustainability at Princeton; Anthony Shu, former business manager of Spoon University-Princeton (now at study abroad); and Tim Searchinger, research scholar at WWS-STEP.
